Doing Business in Real Time
About this Blog:
The global economy has a life of its own, it lives in real-time, and we are all part of it. Hello brave new world.
Oh No, Did We Forget Something?
In the last system review on the last day of the design step, our business sponsor had second thoughts about building the system he and his people had designed with us. His company is engaged in a major IT infrastructure upgrade and the bulk of their IT resources are devoted to that work. Yet many of the business units need new applications and cannot wait for 12-24 months while the infrastructure work is being done. So they are experimenting with us on an agile development approach called the 30-Day Blitz™.
The blitz depends on quickly building project momentum by focusing on development of a “robust 80% solution” and putting it into production in 30 calendar days. Then, after people have a chance to use it for a few weeks, we do another blitz and add more system features. This implies three things: the first thing is we have to stick to very tight time lines as there is no slack in a blitz schedule; secondly, we can only build 80% solutions since 100% solutions cannot be done in 30 days; and lastly, business people have to trust IT people when we tell them they will get another chance to add more features to the system after we deliver the first version.
That last thing, the part about trusting there will be another chance to add more system features, is critical to the success of a blitz. When that trust fails, business people start remembering all the times in the past when they fell for the old “Phase Two” ploy. A lot of business people have experienced this ploy and nobody wants to fall for it again. It happens when IT project teams try to manage scope; after a certain point on a project all further system features asked for by the business users are pushed into a future release, something called “Phase Two”.
The problem is, traditionally, the first phase still takes 18-36 months and costs a lot of money and when it’s finally finished, there is no more cash (and often no more enthusiasm) to do another phase of development. So business people wind up being left high and dry, stuck with whatever they settled for in the first phase. This causes them to resolve not to settle for anything less than everything they want when it comes to working with IT again on new systems.
Breaking development phases into 30 day iterations is a way to regain business users’ trust. If the first version of a system is delivered in 30 days, people can believe there actually will be another 30 day phase to add more features. And since there are only about 22 working days in a 30 day period, that means we can only take two days to define what the system will do, seven days to design how the system will do it, and thirteen days to build the system.
So, obviously, things happen fast on a blitz (that’s why it’s called a blitz). If we only have seven days to do system design, people can easily start to feel like they must have forgotten something that should be in the system. They get flashbacks of all the painful experiences where they didn’t get some important feature into a system and had to live without it.
When we see business people do the, “Oh no, did we forget something?” behavior on a blitz there is only one answer we can give them. We have to say, “Yes, you did forget something, and it’s alright. We'll get it in the next blitz.”
We go back to the
Previous Post: A Business Icon Quietly Fades AwayNext Post: Paper Ballots or E-Voting; That is the Question
What is Tech Briefcase?
TechBriefcase is a new, free service where IT Professionals can Search, Store and Share IT white papers and content like this. Learn more
Bookmark content
Speed up your research efforts with content across the web.
Search and Store
Find the white papers you need. Create folders for any topic.
View Anywhere
Open your briefcase on your iPhone, tablet or desktop. Share with colleagues.
Most Discussed Posts
Cloud computing has emerged as one of the most significant game changers to hit the technology landscape in the past 20 years. With this massive expansion of the cloud, the perception of the IT organization is shifting from a utility player to a change agent. This eBook breaks down five ways progressive organizations are using cloud-based IT Management solutions to help drive innovation and become more strategic, including: adding visibility and analytics, speeding up time-to-value, lowering costs, improving prioritization, and providing a blueprint for future cloud deployments.
Read the white paper to see how IBM helped Citigroup deliver new services and enhancements to their 200 million customers faster.
There are 3 ways to modernize legacy applications: rewrite completely, acquire packaged solutions or migrate existing code. This paper explains why it's best to migrate and how IBM® Rational® software can help.
Accommodating specific lines of business can result in a hybrid ecosystem of applications and servers. The resulting complexity of this architecture makes for an environment that is costly to maintain and difficult to change when addressing new challenges.
This whitepaper will help you to define a mobile device passcode policy. Security managers must attempt to reconcile two opposing goals. They must: 1) create a passcode policy that is strong enough to protect the device if it is lost or stolen, while: 2) not annoying users with needless length or complexity.
This whitepaper, authored by The Radicati Group, looks at the key reasons organizations should consider moving to a cloud-based archiving solution. Email archiving solutions enable organizations to store, monitor, and collect electronic data exchanged by their users to comply with internal policies and regulations.
ATERNITY will showcase a 30-minute demo on how Fortune 500 companies are leveraging its award-winning FPI Platform to deliver a user-centric approach to Proactive IT Management.
For businesses to move forward and tap into the ever-expanding universe of Internet users and network-enabled devices, it's critical to learn how to make the transition to IPv6. Learn the critical steps your organization must take to make a seamless transition-and keep your business world connected.
Learn how IT teams can protect against spear phishing tactics. Harry Sverdlove, chief technology officer of Bit9 offers a frank discussion about spear phishing - the most common technique used in today's advanced attacks.
Learn how to build a solid business case for your migration to Red Hat Enterprise Linux so you can run leaner, innovate faster, be more flexible and own the New Now.
Social media isn't about you; it's about everything around you. As you consider how your customers want to communicate with you, social media is something that can't be ignored. But what should your strategy be? Is social media "just another channel?" What kind of a plan makes sense for your contact center and for your customers? Join our experts as they share their insight and research results.
Hardware tokens were a popular method of strong authentication in past years but the cumbersome provisioning and distribution tasks, high support requirements and replacement costs have limited their growth. The additional log-in steps that hardware tokens require and the resulting user frustrations have limited adoption and make them impractical for larger scale partner and customer applications.
Sponsored Links
